All Courses
-
URP 700 001 FA 2024
This is a seminar on urban theory, with an emphasis on urban intellectual history and critical social theory. It is intended for both doctoral students and advanced master’s students interested in deepening their theoretical understanding of cities, urbanization and spatial development. Readings cover classic texts in urban theory (including the German and Chicago Schools), important late 20th Century writers (e.g., David Harvey, Henri Lefebvre, and Manuel Castells), and emergent themes in 21st century urban theory (such as global cities, urban political ecology, urbanism in the Anthropocene, postcolonialism, cyber/digital/virtual urbanism, planetary urbanism, etc.). This course is required for doctoral urban planning students. Given the interdisciplinary nature of the readings and topics, students from other degree programs outside urban planning are also encouraged to attend. (In past years, we have had students from sociology, architecture, history, information, English, anthropology, SEAS and political science.) We explore such topics as: • What are the origins of modern thought about the city? • Where does the city end and society begin? • How do disciplines (urban planners, sociologists, economists, geographers, etc.) approach the city differently? • What are alternative perspectives on place and space (physical, mental, social)? • What is the interaction between industrialization, urbanization, modernism, and capitalism? And are we entering a new era beyond this quartet? • How does our shifting conception of nature (in this era of sustainability and climate crisis) in turn transform our stance towards cities? • What are the origins of pro- and anti-urbanism in American history? Is this an example of American exceptionalism or a more universal tendency? • Cities were once tangible symbols of modernist human progress. Have we rejected this ideology, or instead simply updated it with a fascination about smart cities and urban innovation ecosystems?
-
URP 489 001 FA 2024
This course (first taught in fall 2023) explores the interplay of cities and technology: both the reason that tech innovation concentrates in cities (tech clusters) and the transformative impact of technologies on urban life (smart cities). (1) How do cities provide the environment to creatively generate technological innovations? and (2) How do technologies enable cities to thrive and concentrate people, businesses and culture in small spaces? The overall theme is the dynamic interaction between place, urban form, technological innovation, and economic development. We begin with the evolution, planning, design, funding, and future of high-tech clusters. What are their economic advantages (higher levels of innovative learning-and-interaction, synergies across firms and sectors, higher wages and job advancement, a critical mass of entrepreneurial activity and venture capital), as well as the social and environmental costs (e.g., on housing affordability, labor markets, open space, pollution, inequality, traffic)? We contrast government versus private-driven tech clusters, and explore the role of research universities as hubs and instigators of tech parks. We trace the shifting geography of these tech centers: starting on the East Coast but later migrating south and west; moving from industrial cities to modern, campus-like suburban settings; and the recent “back-to-the city” push to build urban “innovation districts.” Overall, why do people, businesses, capital and ideas tend to cluster together in specific locations at specific historical moments, then break apart and recombine elsewhere? We then turn to the rise of “smart cities.” What is the promise and dangers of treating cities as if they are computer networks? We examine privacy, surveillance, sensors and big data; NextGen urban mobility (automated vehicles, Uber/Lyft; etc.); Generative AI-driven urban planning/design.